netidee Stipendien: Internet Economics and Antitrust Law

The PhD thesis of Arno Scharf, which deals with the antitrust aspects of the business model "service against data" of online platform operators, was published by LexisNexis.

Arno Scharf about his thesis: "Due to increasing digitalization and the rapid rise of business models based on Big Data, internet giants like Google, Facebook & Co are increasingly coming into the focus of competition authorities. If a market-dominant company demands too much (user) data, from an antitrust perspective this may constitute a violation of the Union law prohibition of abuse of market power enshrined in Art 102 TFEU. The background to this is that consumers in the digital economy regularly do not pay a monetary price, which normally serves as a yardstick for functioning quality competition. Instead, the economic consideration consists of consent to data processing conditions, which - unlike monetary charges - are not subject to competitive control. Similar to a monetary price, however, an excessively high 'data price' risks harming consumers and exploiting them in violation of antitrust law."

The paper was published in January 2023 with the title “Datenmissbrauch im Kartellrecht” by the publisher LexisNexis.

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